Lies of the Nixon Center

On the wall over my desk hangs an amusing trophy from the late, disgraced former President, Richard M. Nixon, whose lies about Watergate ultimately forced him from office. I framed Nixon’s letter–extolling secretive textile magnate Roger Milliken as one of America’s greatest businessmen–beside the May 1989 Forbes piece in which I also reported on the suitcases of cash Milliken gave to both Nixon presidential campaigns.

On October 19, 2006, I encountered a liar rivaling Nixon–ironically then a “senior fellow” at Washington’s Nixon Center. Also then a consultant to ABC News and the U.S. Defense Department (DOD), Alexis Debat appeared at New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security on an “expert” panel on the Muslim Brotherhood. Debat claimed he was writing “a book on the Muslim Brotherhood,” reportedly with an enormous, indirect DOD grant, through the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) headed by former DOD analyst Andrew Krepinevich.

Masquerading as a Sorbonne Ph.D. and former French Defense Ministry adviser, Debat simultaneously made the most preposterous claims. “Let’s stop hyperventilating about the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said, adding, “I hear the same things in a [British] church as I hear in a mosque”–despite frequent, recurrent incitements emanating from Islamic mosques, centers and schools, including myriad tapes, textbooks, and other media.

“Islam is a source of enlightenment,” Debat said, calling the Muslim Brotherhood “chiefly a ‘political movement, not a party,”–a “liberation” movement, and a “highly pragmatic” prospective “leader in Egypt.”

As was obvious from his foolish remarks, Debat was no Muslim Brotherhood “expert.” Indeed, in September 2002 Agence France Presse had reported, the French Defense Ministry never employed Debat in any capacity–a fact further corroborated by terror expert Jean Charles Brisard, in a Sept. 26, 2007 email. Moreover, Debat never received a Sorbonne Ph.D.

Responding to my Oct. 23, 2006 American Thinker report, Debat falsely complained of “misquotes and distortions,” which I easily refuted. NYU’s Center for Law and Security didn’t publish a recording–which would have been too embarrassing.

Not until September 2007 did Debat’s employers take action, however, after his blatant serial fraud spilled onto the pages of Mother Jones, where national security reporter Laura Rozen exposed his frequent lies. Debat was officially forced to leave ABC, resign from the Nixon Center, and flee the U.S. According to Brisard, who remains in close contact with French intelligence, by late September 2007, Debat had taken refuge in the Dominican Republic to avoid a French civil suit and an imminent ABC lawsuit in the U.S. Debat has been totally debunked. One wonders why it took so long.

More important, however, is why anyone still seriously considers Debat’s false notion of a “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood–the known parent of every Islamic terror group operating today.

The Defense Department’s CSBA subcontractor fired Debat, reportedly before his ideas bled into official U.S. defense policy. Yet, Debat’s equally dubious Nixon Center colleague, Robert Leiken, has successfully injected, among high-level U.S. policy makers, a lethal poison notion, that moderation and reform have taken hold within this radical Muslim organization. Mind, Leiken’s expertise and training lie in the politics of Latin America, as Poole reminded us in June 2007.

There are no ideas remotely moderate or reformist within the Brotherhood, which continues unconditionally stating, in Arabic and English, its plan to Islamize the globe and impose shari’a (Islamic law) worldwide–largely through “flexibility”” (muruna in Arabic). That is, by deceiving as many people, for as long as possible, regarding the their true purpose. No wonder the Muslim Brothers seamlessly partnered with the Nazis during World War II, and with Nazi propagandists like pious Muslim convert Johannes (Omar Amin) von Leers long after.

The Muslim Brotherhood supports and defends violence against civilians, despite false claims widely circulated to the contrary. The current General Guide, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, strategically calls upon all Muslim Brotherhood “member organizations to serve” the global agenda to defeat the West, and on “individual members” worldwide to join the MB “resistance” to the U.S.–both financially and “through active participation.”

As reported innumerable times, particularly in the seven years since 9/11, both by Arab Muslims and Western media, the Muslim Brotherhood is not only large, it is one of the most malevolent forces operating worldwide today.

In November 2001, following the Swiss raid on the home of MB financier Yousef Nada, the group has long operated as the central terror funding command, wiring funds for terror attacks through banks like the now-shuttered Al Taqwa, Saudi Arabia’s Dallah Al-Baraka Group, al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation and Kuwait Finance House—as well as the Islamic Development Bank, a.k.a. the Intifada Bank for funding families of suicide bombers and Bank Meli of Iran.

In the same 2001 raid, Swiss police discovered a Muslim Brotherhood strategic plan—“Towards a worldwide strategy for Islamic policy”—written in 1977 and 1982 by MB spiritual leader Yousef Qaradawi and known as The Project. This plan instructs members to “establish the Islamic state and gradual, parallel work to control local power centers…using institution[s] as means to this end.” This requires “special Islamic economic, social and other institutions,” and “the necessary economic institutions to provide financial support” to spread fundamentalist Islam, as well as the use of “diverse and varied surveillance systems, in several places, to gather information and adopt a single effective warning system serving the worldwide Islamic movement.”

A series of fine articles by Youssef Ibrahim, Patrick Poole, Douglas Farah, Jonathan D. Halevi and many others have clearly demonstrated the folly of believing claims of a “reformist” Muslim Brotherhood, or “liberating” Muslim Brothers. We can only hope that the lies of outed fraud Alexis Debat, and other MB apologists like Robert Leiken, will prove less consequential than those of Nixon.

To be certain, short of calling in some clean new plumbers, the Nixon Center might want to flush some Drano under the tap.

Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is currently Managing Editor at the Leeb Group. A former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); she is also a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991).
She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977).
During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others.
She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects.
Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine.
Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.
Alyssa A. Lappen can be reached at alyssaalappen@alyssaalappen.org